Joplin Schools Testimonial

Dave Pettit, Director of Facilities at Joplin Schools, shares his experience with FMX.

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Transcript

I’m Dave Pettit, the Director of Facilities with Joplin Schools. I’ve been with the school district for 26 years. The background that I came from was a general contractor firm before I came to work for the school district working in the maintenance department.

Joplin Schools is in the Southwest corner of the state of Missouri. We’re a town of 50,000, have 1.8 million square feet of buildings that we take care of, 7,400 students, and about 1,200 employees in the district. Our maintenance department consists of 72 custodians and 18 maintenance staff.

The best thing about FMX, and one of the top things that personally sold me, was that FMX allowed us to establish communication along the broad scope of a work order from start to completion. Even after completion, we can still communicate.

FMX has helped us reach our goals of being efficient and effective, which are district-wide goals. They’ve helped us get there financially—we’ve been able to save $25,000–$30,000 because of the amount of time it has saved us. We’ve also been able to eliminate multiple software from other users to come under one roof—one simple login that allows IT, transportation, maintenance, facilities, reservations, and more to come into one scope.

When we started talking to FMX, it didn’t take us long at all to move from skepticism or fear in changing to excitement. The great things we knew we were going to be able to do with FMX to help the department and simplify things for the department took away any hesitation that we had about the onboarding process. Even as we came through the onboarding process, it was even simpler than we anticipated it would be.

My expectations with FMX were that we would get a boxed unit, we would install the software, and then we would have to change the way we do business. The nice thing about FMX was that the customer service staff worked with us to configure FMX to the way we were already doing business. Even in the last 18 months of working with them, if we need to configure or adjust anything they do that with us so that we can get the product that works best for us.

FMX cares about us as an individual and as a school district. I don’t feel like they sold us a product and then moved on to the next bigger and better thing. But they are someone I can call at any time.

FMX is one of those companies that if I wasn’t in education, I can see myself working there. It’s a relaxed feel when you talk to customer service, they keep the customer as #1, and they work with the customer on what their desires are instead of shoving them into a box to give them a cookie-cutter approach. They actually care about how I want to do business and work with me to try to accomplish that.